This Country Is No Longer Yours by Avik Jain Chatlani

Published by Penguin Random House Canada/Bond Street Books on May 7, 2024

This Country Is No Longer Yours tells the story of Peru from roughly 1980 to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The story is told from different perspectives in five sections, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third.

The focus is on a civil war (or, depending on how you look at it, a fight between the government and terrorists) during the 1980s and 90s. The brief initial section is narrated by a Peruvian student who, at the behest of a professor, is in Cambodia during the late 1970s to study Pol Pot’s version of Maoism. He is tasked with watching “the end of the world” — or, at least, the end of more than a million lives at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, whose members have evacuated cities and towns, forcing residents to work collectively in fields, “liberating” them from capitalist excess while murdering university students, teachers, lawyers, doctors, members of the media, landlords, and Pol Pot’s critics. The student is uncertain that Pol Pot’s methods can be implemented effectively in Peru.

The professor is Abimael Guzman. He wants to lead his own Maoist revolution in Peru. To that end, he founds the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). The Shining Path wages a guerrilla war with the aim of liberating ordinary people from the influence of intellectuals, politicians, property owners, and anyone else who doesn’t follow Guzman’s brand of communism. Terrorizing the population with brazen robberies and killings, the Sendero kill and gut stray dogs before stringing them up on lampposts, symbolizing the fate of the “dogs who betray Mao.”

Within a few years, Sendero terrorists have chased Indians from the countryside into Lima, where they live in poverty. Most people with resources have secured visas and fled the country.

Part two is narrated by a government security officer who works under an advisor to President Garcia known as the Doctor. The officer is later recruited to work for Garcia’s successor, Alberto Fujimori (El Chino). The officer fights against the terrorists by adopting their tactics. He kills Sandero members who try to rob the passengers on a bus but raids aid organizations (purportedly to search for Sandero sympathizers) and steals their cash. He enlists surgeons to harvest organs from the dead. He matches the symbolism of hanging dogs on lampposts by hanging the corpses of terrorists from trees. As the two sides wage war, electricity regularly fails, streets are increasingly empty, food is in short supply, and all the people caught in the middle are losing hope.

Readers who are old enough to remember Dean Acheson will not be surprised that he makes an appearance in the novel, furthering the American policy of supporting any corrupt dictator who claims to be fighting communism. Acheson offers military support to Peru’s president by arming thousands of (mostly South American) soldiers and positioning them in Argentina in anticipation that they will “intervene” in Peru. Acheson is correctly portrayed as “a hopeless man” with “hopeless causes.” Naturally, Acheson supports the Peruvian president’s plan to fight communism by claiming more power for himself, effectively making himself a dictator. People in the streets cheer as members of the legislature are dragged away in handcuffs. So much for democracy. The U.S. is fine with anti-democratic dictatorships as long as the dictator isn’t a communist.

Newspapers are controlled with payoffs rather than overt censorship. The president intends to deal with terrorists by detaining them indefinitely without a trial and gathering information through torture, a reprehensible path that America later followed at Guantanamo and the various dark sites at which it stashed purported terrorists. The Peruvian president's plan also meets with Acheson’s approval. To me, the dissection of America’s exacerbation of Peru’s troubles is at least as interesting as the larger story.

The third section is narrated by a female journalist as she covers the election of 2001. A nationalist is running for president on a platform of expelling all people of foreign blood from Peru. To prove he’s tough, he advocates death by stoning as punishment for nearly every crime, including homosexuality. Sounds like a forerunner of MAGA. He will lose the election to a more enlightened but equally corrupt candidate. His daughter writes letters to the journalist that tell awful truths about her abusive father. Their differing perspectives call attention to the glory and shame of both Lima and its mountainous countryside.

The journalist travels to Andahuaylas in the mountains, where her grandfather was killed during the civil war because he was a shopkeeper. She is interested in the lives of the provincial women. She learns that they profess to be proud of their husbands despite their tendency to be violent, unemployed drunkards. It doesn’t occur to them that the post-war media attention the provinces are receiving has nothing to do with their husbands.

In the final section, two former terrorists meet again in a time of relative peace. One is now a teacher with a family, but he attempts to rekindle a relationship with a woman he once admired as a ruthless killer of dogs. She was captured, imprisoned, and repeatedly raped by soldiers. Now she has no papers and is selling herself on the street.

The changing perspectives over a period of years are a useful way to provide insight into the suffering of Peruvian people inside and outside of Lima because of both political leaders and purported revolutionaries. At the same time, the shifting perspectives impair the reader’s opportunity to become engaged with any character’s story.

I appreciated the novel’s illustration of the failure of leadership in Peru, both in the government and in the use of uncontrolled violence to challenge the government. The reader is nevertheless kept at a distance from the violence that caused so much harm. Characters talk about disappearances and rapes, but the story never focuses on an incident in a way that drives home the pain the country must have felt. For that reason, I admire the novel more as a history lesson than as a dramatic work.

RECOMMENDED

The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa

First published in Spain in 2016; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 27, 2018

The Neighborhood is set in Peru during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori. Noted for corruption and human rights abuses (but also for improving the Peruvian economy and waging war on terror, which accounted for his popularity), Fujimori is a tangential character in The Neighborhood, lurking but never seen.

Two couples who are good friends occupy a good part of the story. Marisa is married to the engineer Enrique Cárdenas. Luciano, Enrique’s friend and lawyer, is married to Chabela.

A curfew forces Chabela to spend the night at Marisa’s house, prompting the onset of erotic sensations when Marisa feels Chabela’s ankle pressed against her own. The two women have a passionate encounter, but Chabela leaves in the morning as if nothing happened. Was it a dream? Marisa isn’t sure, but she’s delighted when Chabela invites her to spend three days with her in Miami.

The curfew is a result of terrorism in Peru that lurks in the novel’s background. The MRTA is kidnapping anyone who might be worth a ransom. Terror instigated by Shining Path has caused many businessmen to flee from Lima, but Enrique has stayed. He has successfully avoided adversity until a reporter delivers disturbing photographs to Enrique of an orgy arranged by a Central European businessman a couple of years earlier. Enrique figures prominently in the photographs.

The reporter, Rolando Garro, makes his living by ruining lives with gossipy tabloid journalism. One life he ruined belongs to an aging artist known as Juan Peineta, a professional reciter of poetry who took a lucrative job on television (the enemy of poetry) as one of the Three Jokers, only to be scorned by Garro. Peineta has vowed revenge.

The three intertwined stories — Chabela’s affair with Marisa, Enrique’s blackmail woes, and Peineta’s anger at Garro — unfold in alternating chapters. One point of the story, as applicable to the US as to Peru, is that people love gossip, particularly when the gossip brings down high society. By being the great destroyer, gossip is the great equalizer.

But the greater point of the story is that power corrupts, and that the powerful control the powerless in ways that are both direct and indirect. In Peru as in other countries, wealth can lead to a corruption of the media when the people who control news outlets use them to advance their own ends.

A chapter near the end brings all the stories together in paragraphs that jump from one story to the next, giving the impression of lives unfolding simultaneously. Fortunately, Mario Vargas Llosa structures the chapter in a way that avoids undue confusion.

Entertaining characters provide comic relief while a fair amount of sex lightens what is in essence a dark story about political corruption that (as one of the characters observes) threatens to turn Peru into a stereotypical banana republic. The ending is satisfying and to the extent that the novel is historically accurate, the ending is historically true.

Yet the lightness, the feel-good nature of the story, also makes The Neighborhood less substantial than its subject matter. Llosa seems to be trying to condemn tabloid journalism while milking sexual entanglements for entertainment value — exactly what the tabloids do. And while Llosa condemns political corruption, he doesn’t give the reader a full sense of just how awful Fujimori was. I enjoyed The Neighborhood, but it is far from Llosa’s best work, and not a book that will sit on the top shelf of South American fiction.

RECOMMENDED